Mic Wright is a journalist specialising in technology, music and popular culture. He lives in Dublin.

Tim Cook's Apple TV talk is just another tease

When it comes to Apple, a couple of vague sentences are enough to set the rumour mill into overdrive, enliven analysts and make the markets take notice. Tim Cook may not be Steve Jobs, but the Apple CEO knows just as well as his predecessor that even the hint of a new product from the notoriously secretive company is enough to stoke wild speculation. During his first real television interview, Cook told NBC's Brian Williams: "When I go into my living room and turn on the TV, I feel like I have gone backwards in time by 20 to 30 years. It's an area of intense interest. I can't say more than that." He doesn't need to. Those 37 words are enough to spark thousands more on what lies behind them and when Apple will finally release a full-scale television.

Only, Cook isn't saying anything new. He used practically the same phrase – "an intense area of interest to us" – when asked about television during his interview onstage at the AllThingsD D10 conference in May. That statement followed several previous hints and Steve Jobs's biographer, Walter Isaacson, telling an interviewer: "[Jobs] did talk about the television. He told me he'd 'licked it' and once said, 'There's no reason you should have all these complicated remote controls.' He had three things he wanted to reinvent: the television, textbooks and photography."

It makes sense for Cook to refer obliquely to future plans for the living room in the week that Apple's stock took its biggest drop in four years. With analysts getting shaky over the iPhone's potential for growth in China and figures showing Apple's share of the tablet market slipping, the hint of the long-rumoured TV plans provides a reason to be excited about the company's future. Similarly, the timing of an announcement that Apple will spend more than $100 million to assemble one of its Mac lines – most likely the iMac – in the US from next year is interesting. Coming at the start of the Christmas season, it gives Apple headlines that will play well with patriotic American consumers.

Both the hint to the future and the manufacturing announcement are part of the same strategy to show that Cook has got everything under control. Despite record profits, he's had a mixed first year as Apple's permanent CEO. The company has removed two senior executives and issued two public apologies – the first over its brief withdrawal from the EPEAT environmental standards, the second after the disastrous launch of its Maps app – and weathered a series of other minor embarrassments including this week's Russian iTunes porn farrago.

It's still likely to be some time before Apple reveals any successor to the current Apple TV set-top box, but you can expect the nods and winks to continue. The promise of something new has always worked well for the company. Cook was clear in his Bloomberg BusinessWeek interview that while Apple is willing to be more transparent about charitable giving and conditions in its supply chain, it will remain incredibly secretive about everything else. The face at the top may be different but Apple's message remains frustratingly unchanged: wait and see.